Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire | @hebdenlyon

‘The boy threw stones skimmed the lake wished his future to be now unbeknown to him it had passed …’

All writing is fiction, filtering reality through the eyes and richness of the author’s imagination. In absurdly symbolic ways, emotional instability and volatile relationships, a writer creates other lives. Inserting - or omitting - convenient words constructing a world they feel comfortable inhabiting.

Driven by my own psychological hinterland - adopted on my first birthday - I learnt how to function in my world by embracing public deceit and private truth. Who would believe my story? Mother a professional dancer, father a businessman, banished to South Africa; both pursued their own lives in a gleefully forgetful emotional vacuum. I enjoy revealing hypocrisy - the velvet subtext of an author’s craft: neither grandparent had married, but cared not admit.

My house and family riven with their ghosts, misdeeds and violations of other’s souls. Who could not write with such a background: inventing the missing pieces of one’s own anger strewn personal jigsaw. At odds with the world - my circumstances and myself - inventiveness became my escape.

A bastard’s emotional pugilism have hewn this writer. In bleakness I discover hope, and in normality, fear. In each story, as in myself, there is a search to retrieve a lost morality. Often something so obvious, so easy to miss, as when as a child I threw a stone into a park’s lake in Liverpool. Ripples vanishing as belief disappeared.

My interests are spiritual and hedonistic. Communing with ancestral memories and walking through mist searching displaced souls. Other worldly and out of body experiences fascinate me, as does emotional pain. My perfect day is sitting outside a French pavement café watching life drift past - either in a bustling city, or in the depths of the fragrant countryside. My ideal night is drinking Islay whisky relaxing in front of a peat fire awaiting the visitor to enter my stone cottage.